Shwop Shop

Marks & Spencer is making sure you get proactive when it comes to recycling and sustainable thinking - by shwopping. The high street chain is launching a new "buy one, give one back" campaign in collaboration with Oxfam in a bid to change the shopping behaviour of consumers once and for all - and it's enlisted the lovely Joanna Lumley to help too.

Advertisement

"It involves and affects us all and makes good sense all round," says the actress and campaigner who was blown away by the idea when she heard about it. "You never imagine a huge business to do something so truly human - that feeling of involving ordinary people, how we can help and what we can do."

Rex Features

Read next

Marks & Spencer SS19: The Vogue Verdict

ByEllie Pithers

The idea behind the initiative - which officially launches today at the Old Truman Brewery in London's East End alongside a Sustainable Lab pop-up shop curated by London College of Fashion - is to reduce the amount of clothing that goes to landfill. Currently, the UK throws away one billion items of clothing a year.

Advertisement

"None of this will go to landfill - it will be resold and recycled. I have a staggering amount of bras," says Lumley, for example, "ones that fitted then or looked lovely, different kinds of bras. I can't put them in the dustbin, so all of these bras are going to be taken out to Africa and go to African bosoms."

Customers are invited to leave their old or unwanted clothes at Marks & Spencer stores, where they will then be given to Oxfam. The charity will then either re-sell them through its network of stores, re-use them in international markets (for example as summer clothing in Africa, warm clothing in Eastern Europe), or recycle them into new materials. The idea is that it's a step on from "buy one, get one free" and that we move on from being scared of all things second hand.

"If you think about it, even when you stay in the grandest of hotels you're sleeping in second-hand beds and sheets - we need to stop worrying about 'someone else'," explains Lumley, noting that today's youth have been encouraged to buy and throw away and that there appears to be an admiration for the disposable - and we need to get away from that.

Read next

Marks & Spencer Launches Behind-The-Scenes Business Podcast

ByAlice Newbold

Rex Features

Her own tips for small things you can do to help the process along?

"Dry cleaners' hangers - take them back to the cleaner. I save them up and then return them all so they can be used again. And I'm planning what to do with all those elastic bands from the postman - perhaps a big tar manufacturer can do something with them," she ponders.